Month: February 2020

I see you through the plane window as we descend. You have exploded into colour.

We met as the camps were liberated, didn’t we, in the rubble and the ash and the bone we met, we had lost everything but we had found each other, I saw your lioness heart and it pulled me in.

You stamped my ticket at a vaudeville show. An awkward moment of small talk, we could barely keep eye contact through the discomfort. Creation and destruction in your eyes. I looked for you afterwards but you were gone.

We followed Moses to the promised land. We had faith then. Great seas parted, unspeakable miracles. We built a family on new earth, raised our children.

Bright eyed, seventeen years of age, hope aflame, we marched off to war together and we never came home. We had wanted to save the world. I imagine our parents waiting there at the station, breathless, red-eyed, scanning all the young faces. They wait for us still.

I moistened your lips in a hospital room one evening. You were dying, the cancer was slowly eating away at your lungs. I recited Bible verse and you squeezed my hand.

“Bind me as a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”

Two thousand years later, a colony on Mars. I see you here in the dirt and the rock and the sunrise.

I have seen you in a million places.
I have met you in a million forms.

You were there at the formation of our solar system, you whispered to me something about love everlasting and then you fell from my grasp and everything turned to fire.

All the myths were always pointing to you. All the stories I told my children as they grew.
“Tell us that one again, Daddy. The one about the sweet friends who kept meeting.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

We have been male and female, vegetable and stone, formless and form, the swallow and the eagle, the snake and the gazelle, fantastic creatures of the deep. We have been crucified, whipped, tied to posts and burnt, draped in gold and silver jewels and lauded by the world and derided in turn. We have faced the firing squad together, our bodies pressed close one last time, flesh to flesh as we became vessels for spirit.

You have been my brother, my sister, my child. I have mothered you from infancy, and you have mothered me in return. We have been lovers and friends, we have recognised each other in countless disguises, here on the same side and there on different sides. And in the end there were no sides at all, only this magnificent Loop, this One Circle – majestic, resplendent, regal, unbroken through time, utterly mysterious, and towering over all things.

These pages are wet with tears now, thinking of you, remembering your many faces, the ink is running, the words are fading, I will lose this poem if I do not stop writing.

I’m in love with garden harvests. All the green and underground lovelies. Waiting to give their best for the cause. Rainbow palate in each haul. Insects unknowingly caught up in the action, making the trip back to the garden on their own.

Herbs, hots, sweets, medicinal cures and teas sharing a harvest basket. Happily sacrificing themselves for the good of the order. Whatever that means lol. Harvesting the mature, the impressive, the plenty. Garden basket and clippers in hand.

I’m in love with Shagbark Hickory trees. I see myself in their rough, hanging, falling pieces. Not ready for discard, yet falling nonetheless. Some strips falling and decomposing quickly, surrendering their riches to fertilize the hungry earth. Some bark hanging on longer, still with something to say, remaining vertical and visible until their voices are no longer heard by the forest.

Shagbark gripping the earth below, grounding wide and deep. Solid. Fingers and toes long n scraggly, twisting and turning in the silent light and dark. Seeking, still, layers of life and death intermingling. Nutrients for the taking, earth’s gifts used and returned. Shedding pieces of our story, revealing a less burdened smoother version of ourselves ready for the next season of life.

After all this time. After all these years. I still feel like a problem. I still fear the future. Fearing things that will probably never happen. I still fear being inadequate. I still fear losing everything. I still fear bodily injury. I still fear being physically unable to protect myself. I still fear not being worthy. I still fear that there’s more abuse to remember.

Not run n hide fear. Not shuddering, shaking, shivering fear. This is a different, insidious terror that habitually shortens my exhale. That lives in my chest wall, drawing my left shoulder up. That creeps inside of my lower facial muscles, adding tone and twitches and tight. The terror that steals the white of my eyes, their vibrant sparkle, absent once more. Replacing the white with a dryer, dusty pink.

Fear of not measuring up, of being found out for not being the best, not being in the know, of not being brilliant, not being happy, fear of having fear… Fear that others might see my imperfection, my angry, my jealousy, my procrastination, disgust, my light, my compassion, my heart, my gratitude, my self love. Fear that others might see my HUMAN.